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Burim Uganda Blog “We Have Changed The Reputation of Their School for Good!”

Apr 30, 2014

Our Uganda Program is going very well–I have been able to keep teaching in all four of our locations.  One of the locations where we teach is St. Bakhita Nursery and Primary School. I go there on Mondays  and Wednesdays.

 

I teach 5 different classes on Mondays with 338 kids total, and then 4 different classes on Wednesday with 99 kids total–so we are teaching 437 kids at this school right now! We love the school for many reasons, including:

1– they do many great things in here,

2–they have many children who live at the school because they don’t have parents. Most of these children were born to mothers who were used as sex slaves by the rebel army, and some of the children were just left by the child mothers.

3– there are both Christian and Muslim children in the school

 

Today the head teacher said that the kids can’t wait for our music classes — they sing the songs every day and that they even spend their daily 30 minute break singing our songs.  He also said that we have changed the reputation of their school for good, and they are very happy to have our program as part of their school program. The school term is ending soon and they don’t want us to stop the program there, so they asked me if the children could come to school for a music program even during their holidays. I told them YES, absolutely!

 

Another location that appreciates us a lot is the Pabo-Labala Primary school. Pabo was the biggest IDP camp in northern Uganda, with 80.000 -120.000 displaced people living there.  Now a lot of the families have moved to their original villages but there are still a lot of people living there, and we are the only group that visits them for activities.  We started our programs at Pabo during our first trip to Uganda, and In the years since then we have taught child mothers, street kids, school kids, and teenagers–and many in each group were former child soldiers.  We still continue teaching the school kids and the street kids there. The school helps by letting us use the school building for teaching both the school kids and the street kids together– they want us to bring them together and its the only time that the street kids get to go to school.  We now have more kids then ever before because every kid want to be involved in the music program.  They love our classes and they run as soon as they see us coming. Cambel and Joel are two local community leaders who help our program and run it when I am not there.  They make sure that our music classes are held on a regular bases.  We asked the school for permission to continue our classes over the holidays and they said YES!  The kids were so happy to know that we will be there teaching the music classes during the holidays, and we were even happier to have the opportunity to teach them more.